Friday, 31 January 2020

Misconstruing Modal Assessment As Internal Consequence [1]

Martin & Rose (2007: 139-40):
Another kind of internal consequence is to justify an argument, using after all:
On the face of it, we might argue that the evaluation in Helena's story comes from Helena.
She's the narrator after all.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here the authors have misconstrued the function of conjunctive relations as justifying an argument. In SFL Theory, a conjunctive relation is a relation of expansion between spans of text.

[2] To be clear, after all does not mark any conjunctive relation, let alone one of consequence; the meaning here is not that realised by She's the narrator consequently.

In SFL Theory, this instance of after all functions interpersonally, not logically (or textually), as a asseverative propositional comment Adjunct enacting the modal assessment 'obvious'; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 190-1). The meaning here is generally that also realised by She's the narrator obviously.

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